Thoughts on the Covid Pandemic of 2020 - 2021
(3/27/2021)
Thoughts on the Covid Pandemic of 2020 - 2021(3/27/2021)
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Will Smith as "Jay": "Why the big secret? People are smart, they can
handle it."
Tommy Lee Jones as
"Kay": "A
person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know
it."
-- from the 1997 movie: "Men in Black"
Foreword:
These my own
personal notes and thoughts of what occurred during the
Covid-19 pandemic
from my perspective. I write it down so that I don't forget my perspective
at the time. This page isn't to convince anybody of anything. This year has
taught me I cannot influence either individuals or government policy, and I no
longer want to try.
There are a variety of different things that were at play during this pandemic in 2020 - 2021, one of which is that a virus appeared called "SARS-CoV-2" that infected and killed many people which was a great tragedy. What also occurred was a spectacularly self destructive response in our society I've never before witnessed in my 53 years on this planet. A series of circumstances led people to make a bad situation much worse.
Timeline of Events:
Because this is from my perspective, and a large amount of my life is centered
around the company I formed and worked at for 13 years leading up to the
pandemic called Backblaze.
- 12/15/2019 - The "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrom Coronavirus 2" or
"SARS-CoV-2" or "2019 Novel Coronavirus" or "COVID-19" virus is identified.
- 1/10/2020 - The company BioNTech began developing a vaccine based on mRNA
technology that eventually becomes the Pfizer vaccine. Human trials began 2
months later in March, approved by FDA on December 11, 2020.
- 1/20/2020 - The company "Moderna" began developing a vaccine based on mRNA
technology. Human trials began 2 months later in March of 2020, approved by the
FDA on December 18, 2020.
- 1/30/2020 - The World Heath Organization (WHO) declares the outbreak an
emergency
- 3/6/2020 - Backblaze employees all sent home, office is shut down for more
than an entire year with 3 hours warning. That same day Apple, Facebook, Google,
Twitter did the same.
- 3/11/2020 - The WHO declares it a "pandemic"
- 12/11/2020 - The first vaccine gets an
"Emergency Use Authorization" (EUA) approved by the FDA (Pfizer). The second
vaccine (Moderna) get EUA 7 days later. The third vaccine (Johnson &
Johnson) gets EUA on February 28, 2021.
- 1/28/2021 - The very first Backblaze employee receives first dose of a
vaccine. He received "Moderna mRNA-1273".
- 2/13/2021 - The second Backblaze employee receives first dose of vaccine
(Pfizer).
- 3/4/2021 - I receive my first dose. I'm Brian Wilson, Founder and CTO of
Backblaze. Brian received the Pfizer vaccine.
Click
here for pictures, videos, explanation. (Texas)
- 3/5/2021 - The fourth Backblaze employee receives her first dose of vaccine.
(California)
- 3/6/2021 - On the one year anniversary of the Backblaze San Mateo headquarters
being closed, Brian suggests re-opening the San Mateo office for fully
vaccinated employees to return IF THEY WANT TO RETURN. This was
unanimously rejected, the office will stay locked indefinitely, nobody is allowed to
use it.
- 3/8/2021 - The fifth Backblaze employee receives his first dose. (Texas)
- 3/10/2021 - The sixth employee (another officer in the company) receives his
SECOND dose. (California) He got his first dose 3 weeks earlier as part of "they
have extra doses" got lucky situation.
- 3/10/2021 - The seventh employee receives her first dose. (California)
- 3/11/2021 - The eighth employee receives his first dose. (California)
- 3/12/2021 - The ninth employee receives his first dose. (Texas)
- 3/12/2021 - The tenth employee receives receives his first dose. (California)
- 3/13/2021 - The eleventh employee (Derman Uzunoglu) receives his first dose.
Johnson and Johnson. (California)
- 3/13/2021 - The twelfth employee gets his first dose (Oklahoma)
- 3/15/2021 - The thirteenth employee gets first dose (Texas)
- 3/17/2021 - The fourteenth employee gets first dose (California - employee was
in in Sacramento but made trek to Merced, second dose will be in Davis)
- 3/31/2021 - The fifteenth employee gets first dose (California)
-
7/6/2021 - Backblaze office is open first the first time to employees who really
want to use it. Before this it was locked. Special permission had to be granted
to go in.
- 8/3/2021 - San Mateo (where the Backblaze main corporate office
is located) re-institutes mask mandates, even indoors, even for vaccinated
people.
- 8/23/2021 - Pfizer-BioNTech Covid Vaccine gets full approval from
the FDA.
Click here for one article.
a
a
Covid Deaths by Age in 2020:
In the chart below, it shows some numbers of Covid deaths sorted by age, and the
total in 2020 of 329,000. The source is:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/
and archived
here if that link is dead or changes over time (the archive is the "Wayback
Machine - The Internet Archive". There are 328 million people in the United
States in total.
Most People are TERRIBLE at Evaluating Statistical Risk:
In psychology circles, there are a TON of studies that show human beings are
terrible at evaluating risk. Abysmal. This is our reality.
Here is one of many articles written well before Covid existed:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-inertia-trap/201303/why-are-people-bad-evaluating-risks
I have also observed this all of my life.
A "cognitive bias" is a "systemic error" in the way humans think. It leads to irrational and incorrect decisions. There is a list of irrational biases here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases.
One particular mistake people make is that they evaluate "new risks" as much more serious as any risk "that we are accustomed to". As an engineer, I have some slightly autistic tendencies. One of those is that I don't seem to be as emotionally affected by the "new" threats as the average person. This has gotten me in SOCIAL trouble several times in my life. There is a concept in comedy called "too soon". Professional comedians cannot joke about tragedy that is "recent" because it hurts people's feelings. But once enough time has passed, the identical joke becomes "funny". Professional comedians can joke about Custer's Last Stand because it was so long ago. But the same comedians can't tell the same identical joke about a military operation in Iraq a week after it occurred. I'm not talking about jokes on this webpage, but that's the concept most people can grasp - recent events are too emotional and overwhelm people's logical abilities to calculate risk.
Another particular mistake most people make is that if they read about something in the news often, or talk about it often with others, their brains keep FALSELY raising the statistical level of the threat.
Another well know psychological bias is called "Loss Aversion". People are irrationally afraid of PERCEIVED risks, as compared with the real rewards of ignoring those risks. Here is one link about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_aversion_(psychology)#Societal_applications and another link here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/prospect-theory/
Covid-19 was a perfect storm to be incorrectly assessed as a larger threat than it was by people because it was 1) recent, and 2) everybody talked about it everywhere all of the time, and 3) the perceived risk was very serious: death. One thing that elevated the risk in people's minds was seeing EVERYBODY wear a mask. I'm not saying masks were bad for preventing the spread of disease, but the fact that EVERYBODY was wearing a mask reminded us daily there was this new threat called Covid. To keep this forefront in our lizard brains: during the height of the pandemic, you could not read two mainstream news articles without at least one of them being about Covid. You couldn't read 3 Facebook or Twitter posts without one of them being about Covid. This pummeled our lizard brains with information saying, "Covid is the single most important issue, do anything to survive Covid."
Here is a chart of what people die of in the United States that I often look at, you can verify these statistics easily:
Heart Disease: 611,105 people per year (2/10th of 1% of the population - 186
out of 100,000)
Cancer: 584,881 people per year (2/10th of 1% of the population)
Hospital Error: 250,000 people per year - reference:
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/03/476636183/death-certificates-undercount-toll-of-medical-errors
Chronic Respiratory Disease (smoking): 149,205 people per year (45 out of
100,000)
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 130,557 people per year
Stroke: 128,978 people per year
Influenza ("the flu"): 50,000 people per year on an average year, as high as
80,000 in a bad year like 2018. (15 out of 100,000)
Auto Accidents: 33,000 people per year (!!!!)
Gun SUICIDES: 21,175 people per year
Swimming Pool Drownings: 3,536 people per year (1 out of 100,000)
Gun accidentals: 700 people per year
Commercial Airplane Crashes: 32 people
per year (0.01 out of 100,000)
Mass shootings: 28 people per year (0.008 out of 100,000 - basically "zero" out
of 100,000)
If you asked people which they were more worried about: dying of a mass shooting or drowning, 99% of people would say "Mass Shooting" - and they are all dead wrong. Badly, horribly wrong. I believe this is because drownings are never national news. For whatever reason, EVERY mass shooting is read about and known by EVERY person in the United States, but when somebody drowns only the local friends and family know about it and grieve. Please don't freak out and think this is some argument against gun control, or in favor of "pool control" - that's missing the ENTIRE POINT of what I'm saying here. I'm saying people absolutely suck at evaluating statistical risk in their lives. We're only talking about Covid here.
Covid killed about 329,000 people in the United States in the worst year of 2020. That's bad. About the same as heart disease and cancer each killed in the previous year. And the population it killed were the same population as heart disease and cancer (older people). So if you were somebody older than say 60 years old in the year of Covid, this was a VERY REAL THREAT to you, and it was ON TOP OF your large chance of dying that was the "baseline" in a normal year.
However, in the long run of most people's lives of 78.54 years, Covid will disappear down into the range of 0.00002 out of 100,000. Yes it was a close call like that time you almost had a head on collision but swerved at the last second. Yes it was scary. But those of us that survive Covid and car crashes will live a very long time afterwards, and then die of Heart Disease or Cancer like most people in the USA do. And just like Heart Disease or Cancer, young people like 24 year olds never needed to worry at all, it was CLEARLY about in the range of dying in a commercial airline flight in 2020. I was 53 years old in 2020 - if I look at my risk of dying of Covid-19 in 2020 it was about the same as dying in a car crash on my way to work. In 2019 I drove to work 250 times and didn't think it was worth staying at home to avoid the risk. I decided to drive to work in 2019 because I chose the reward of getting paid over the risk of dying. I am using this example of driving to work, because in 2020 the government forced me to stay home from work because of this same risk. The government made the decision to damage my finances, damaged my friend's businesses, destroy people's life savings, destroy their lives and relationships over something about as dangerous to me as driving to work.
I know I won't ever convince even one person that "the two year long economic lockdown wasn't worth it". Their lizard brains just can't process the raw information: that faced with the identical risk in 2019 they accepted the risk of driving to work in order to make money - it was worth it. But in 2020 they were DEATHLY AFRAID of something the same risk to the point of ruining lives, causing suicides and depression. I know people will try to defend the conclusions their irrational lizard brains came up with - that's what people do. I do it, we all do it. People will rationalize this saying things like "driving is not contagious" (doesn't matter, that doesn't affect the outcome). But it's a rationalization trying desperately to defend a flawed conclusion.
Now, I'm not saying there is "one correct decision" when it comes to how much one individual wants to avoid one particular risk: I believe it is a highly personal choice. My problem comes in when somebody ELSE forces me into a decision to avoid a risk that I do not agree with, and that CLEARLY the mathematics and statistics show I shouldn't be forced into this bad decision. In this case, I'm talking about the individuals in government and my co-workers and friends forcing upon me (and other people) their irrational fears of Covid-19 not supported by the raw mathematical numbers. When other (flawed) people in government decide to close OTHER people's businesses, decimate OTHER people's life savings, destroy OTHER people's lives and relationships - that's where I have an issue.
People are profoundly terrible at estimating risks. This doesn't make their feelings invalid, it is just something to understand and take into account.
The Law of Unintended Consequences (or focusing too much
on one number):
Related to the above problem that people have trouble correctly evaluating risks
is the law of unintended consequences. Everybody agrees that "all things
being equal" it would be good to reduce deaths from Covid. The problem is
all things are not equal.
If you only focus on reducing Covid deaths, you would lock everybody in a cage at least 100 feet from every other person until they went insane from lack of social interaction. After that, if you continue to only worry about Covid deaths, some of those people will commit suicide. The problem with focusing on one thing (Covid deaths) instead of taking a holistic approach towards the health of society is it leads to unintended consequences like suicides.
I bring up suicides just to try to get the point through, but it is absolutely the same identical error to simply focus on "maximize survival" of all things. Even if there weren't any suicides, a life locked in a cage is not worth living. It's hard for me to comprehend how other people's minds work, and that this isn't completely obvious: we do "risky" things all the time because they are fun. At some point in our lives, we engage in "fun" activities like we sky dive out of airplanes, we ride motorcycles, we drink alcohol, we have sex with people we just met, we order a diabetes inducing dessert in a restaurant. I know some neurotic people in software engineering that live their lives trying to extend their life to the maximum number of years by staying at home all the time, only eating the most healthy foods, never taking any risks, never ordering a dangerous dessert even once in 20 years. And I consider those people mentally ill and feel sorry for them. They will outlive me, but be miserable the entire time.
I'm not saying you should only eat dessert, and never avoid risk. I'm saying there is a balance. And in a Covid pandemic, that means balancing the risk of a supportive hug of a friend with the risk of dying from Covid.
During the pandemic, everybody lost their minds and focused ONLY on Covid deaths, and ignored that sometimes we want to do "fun" things that are risky.
The Moving Goalposts of Government Imposed Lockdowns:
One of the things that occurred during the pandemic was the government moved the
goalposts around. Constantly. On March 16, California issued a "stay
at home" order. This shutdown the economy and shut down many businesses
and schools, there was a mantra: "Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve" or "15 Days to
Flatten the Curve". The idea was the same number of people would get the
disease, but if we just "flattened the curve" the health care system would not
become overwhelmed. Here is one animation of the concept:
Pretty much everybody agreed that we could handle "two weeks" of economic shutdown, so this had widespread public support, and people ignored that the government just suspended an amazing number of constitutional rights. In everybody's minds (mine included), we accepted this because in two weeks the rights would be restored, no big deal.
Then the goalposts changed. The "two weeks to flatten the curve" morphed out to "do not re-open until Covid-19 is eradicated". Here is one article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/moving-the-shutdown-goal-posts-11587078025. Personally I believe this was accidental. A variety of things happened all at once. People got scared, all of the politicians on both sides tried to politicize and gain advantage through a public health issue, the media made TONS of extra money as everybody clicked on articles talking about Covid-19.
The Viciousness against People with Information or
Opinions that didn't agree with the Narrative:
A recurring theme I noticed early on was that if somebody like me said, "Hey
guys, good news, children are not harmed by Covid very often" I was viciously
attacked and ostracized. Initially I was confused by this, what kind of
psychopath doesn't like good news? What kind of monster wants children to
die? I learned to just stop explaining why it wasn't so bad - I wasn't
convincing anybody, I lost friends, and the friends that remained thought I was
unbalanced. The fact that I was factually correct, and proven in time to
be correct did not help. To this day nobody has ever approached me and
said, "you remember when I yelled at you and called you a Nazi? It turns
out you were dead accurate, totally correct, and I'm sorry about being mean to
you."
About half way through the first year of the pandemic I found some "Lockdown Skeptic" groups on the internet, and this was a universal experience. Repeat a fact that wasn't horrible like "the only good thing is it doesn't kill children very often" and the person saying it was shouted out of the room. There was something about "good news" that was bad, anti-social. As just one of thousands of data points that many people experienced this same phenomenon, here is a tweet from November 24, 2020 expressing these thoughts from another person:
One particular version of this anger towards people with different opinions was mocking people viciously as "stupid" if the people wanted to retain one or more of their civil liberties like the right to assemble with others, or the ability to travel freely, or the right to operate your legal business the way you always had - as long as it didn't cause any harm, as long as it was only FULLY INFORMED consenting adults in a one on one setting like a haircut. People that wanted to retain their rights asked this question: at some low level of danger, is it so bad to retain SOME individual freedom and not hand over dictator level control with zero checks and balances to the (flawed) individuals in government? This question was met with ridicule and hatred. A common spelling ridiculing people who asked politely if they could still assemble one on one with other consenting adults was to say these hateful idiots wanted their "free-dumbs". Wow. Is it REALLY so bad to ask for something spelled out in the Bill of Rights? Something we used to be proud of? That certain rights are so profound, they are "inalienable"? This question was mocked and attacked as if it was OBVIOUS the government is always correct, the government always has our best interests at heart, that no individual in the government has ever been found to be corrupt and out for personal gain.
Personally, I take this truth to be self evident: it is NOT rare AT ALL that we find corrupt government officials that abuse their power. Asking politely to exercise your civil rights should not be mocked.
The Media Profiteered:
Another recurring theme I watched the entire year was that
articles that promoted fear sold more copies, and the media couldn't be bothered
with the truth, or their responsibility. This was so bad, and the effects
on society were so dire, I honestly feel each journalist should be investigated
and punished/sanctioned for their behavior if they KNEW what they were printing
was implying untrue things and fanning the flames of panic and yet wrote it in a
way to make it even worse just for "clicks". The term for this is "click
bait" in my industry. Normally it's essentially harmless - an article with
a title "You won't believe how beautiful these 10 women are" gets more clicks
than "Here are 10 pictures of fashion models". So the industry is given a
lot of leeway. In this case they contributed to TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS of
loss. Loss of human life even.
Complicit in this were the large internet companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc that also gain revenue from these "click bait" fear mongering articles. In the second half of the pandemic, these large companies started actively censoring information that they deemed "untrue", which I have no issues with. They kicked certain people off their platforms for consistently lying like President Trump, and that probably contributed to stability and was arguably justified. But not one of these organizations stopped articles that fanned the flames of panic by presenting Covid as "unknown" and "more dangerous than any other form of disease we know about" even though none of that was factually true.
To be clear, I don't think there was any grand conspiracy. It was a random set of circumstances where Google and Twitter were highly aligned with the interests of the fear mongering journalists and profited from their half true articles. But make no mistake, Google and Twitter looked the other way in order to make more money, and allowed VAST misconceptions about science to stand uncontested on their platforms. And the more people heard Google and Twitter were fact checking, this had an unfortunate side effect of leading people to incorrect conclusions about how dangerous Covid-19 was to our society and to our people. Was Covid bad? Yes. Was Covid a great tragedy? Yes. Did Covid kill a whole lot of people? Yes. Should that excuse Google and Twitter letting incorrect statistics that inflated the numbers of deaths stand unopposed, not fact checked? No, it should not.
EDIT 5/1/2021: I present to you the most morally bankrupt article that has ever been published: https://wamu.org/story/21/05/01/covid-doesnt-discriminate-by-age-serious-cases-on-the-rise-in-younger-adults/ " The title is: COVID 'Doesn't Discriminate By Age'" The author (Will Stone) and his editors that allowed him to publish these factual errors fanning the flames of ignorance and bad statistics to profiteer on clicks is either the most horrible human being willing to lie like some sociopathic monster and should be placed in jail for writing this inflammatory piece when he knows it is totally incorrect (and I do not say that lightly, I mean that from the depths of my seething hatred for lies), or Will Stone is one of the most totally mentally challenged journalists ever to hold a job, and needs to be fired and put in a mental institution for the criminally insane. It's one or the other. He cannot process even the MOST ESTABLISHED statistics, even the most basic statistics. The overwhelming evidence that Covid DOES discriminate by age. Will Stone is claiming in this article that COVID infections and fatalities have zero correlation with the age of the person exposed. Let's just pause there, and grasp the damage Will Stone is doing to society. He is reporting pure lies that have been disproven over and over and over and over again. The CDC disagrees with him. The WHO disgrees with him. This is how bad it is: every single scientist ever published (even the stupid ones) disagree with him. He is saying children die from Covid every bit as often as older people. And people will read this article and repeat it on social media, and Google won't take it down, even though Google knows it is the diametric opposite of factually true. Just stop and ponder everything that went wrong here, and how Will Stone should be punished, and his editors should be punished, and anybody associated with repeating this should be punished. Put in jail even. We know it's lies. Oh wow, is this the biggest lie of all time. And this is after study after study after study says Will Stone is dead wrong. And not in a small way, like "oops, I was rounding up by 10%". Here is a chart of how many people died of Covid in California under age 18:
Ummmmm..... zero is kind of a powerful number. Somebody with even the
most basic IQ of 60 can process the number zero, and at an IQ of 60 they are functionally
mentally retarded by definition. But Will Stone could print this and his
editors couldn't figure out it wasn't even close to correct, or chose to
overlook how it wasn't even close to factually correct. It was
the opposite of correct, and they are so morally bankrupt they allowed it to be
released. How do these people look at themselves in the mirror in the
morning, knowing the lives they are ruining, the devastation they are causing,
the people they are influencing to make decisions counter to everything
scientists are trying to do
and say, "Oh well, I got 500 clicks and it paid out 10 cents, it was worth it."
Just stop and think about that. What we have here is a
Jeffrey Dahmer
level sociopath. They just sold out humanity and our society for 10 cents
worth of clicks. It would not surprise me if Will Stone has some under age
human heads in his refrigerator so he can chew on them later. That's how
bad Will Stone is.
The Media Misrepresents What Scientists Say:
Another recurring theme I watched the entire year was that scientists and researchers
would say things like, "We have studied Coronavirus in the past, and all the
other variants after you get infected once you are generally immune from
infection somewhere from 1 year to 3 years." Journalists would ask the
scientists, "Are you absolutely sure it will be that way this time?"
Scientists are very pedantic, and they would say, "No, we're not completely
totally 100% rock solid sure, but we're pretty confident to 99.999% certain it
will turn out that way." The journalists would then write the headline,
"Scientists don't know anything about this Covid-19, if it doesn't kill you, you
will probably get infected again within 2 months and it will kill you then."
I watched this repeat over and over again, here are some of the things
scientists (and myself) were very sure of early on, that turned out true, that
caused MASSIVE vicious attacks by my friends verbally against me when I tried to
explain. Remember, I was correct in every one of these, but was attacked
for suggesting it was the likely truth (and then it turned out all of these were
true):
The Media Went Silent on Anything that Disagreed with
the Narrative of Lockdowns "work":
Another recurring theme I watched the entire year was that whenever things were
going opposite the narrative of doom, the media went radio silent.
The most spectacular example was Sweden and Florida. The moment these two places changed from locked down to open, and stopped mandating masks the media LOVED to pile it on with article after article that they were "stupid" and "irrational" and they weren't doing the same thing as everybody else. However, nothing bad ever occurred. Sweden and Florida had the same or fewer deaths than the countries and states that locked the economy down beyond any rational level. So the media went silent. It was so reliable that if I hadn't seen an article about Sweden or Florida in a while I knew they were doing BETTER than any other region.
I claim this is corrupt, horrible, and the media is abandoning all morals. If and when you are wrong, or the evidence is showing you might be DESTROYING small businesses, and DESTROYING people's life savings and livelihoods for no reason, it is the media's responsibility to report on it. It is their moral calling to point out they were mistaken earlier. It was an amazing silence whenever Sweden or Florida was showing that the lockdowns weren't guaranteed to save you, and the fact that Sweden and Florida provide a "fly in the ointment", a control case that proved lockdowns didn't work as well as everybody had been led to believe. Even if Sweden and Florida did have worse outcomes, it was worth running the experiment. Turns out, the experiment turned out really well for Sweden and Florida. Here is an analysis saying Sweden did not have mask mandates or lockdowns, and really did about the same as everybody else: https://shahar-26393.medium.com/not-a-shred-of-doubt-sweden-was-right-32e6dab1f47a Near the end of the article is this quote, "But the lockdowns and panic were unsubstantiated, prevented nothing, and caused indescribable damage to society. Sweden’s statistics tell us, unequivocally, that in much of the world lives have been lost and livelihoods have been destroyed — in vain."
Individual "journalists" in the media MUST have been aware of this, and yet flatly refused to mention Sweden and Florida as long as their outcome was the same or better than states who didn't lock down. That is so wrong. I find it morally bankrupt. These journalists should be held accountable for being bad at their jobs. They shirked their responsibility to disclose information to our society.
In the end, when there were vaccinations, the infection rates and deaths DROPPED LIKE A ROCK. The question that is important is: why didn't lockdowns work? Why were vaccinations over 10,000 times more effective as lockdowns? And if lockdowns were less than 1/10th of 1% effective, where were the main stream media reporters, and why don't they talk about that? Go ahead, mainstream media, we're waiting. You have economic destruction on your conscious, and you chose to profit instead.
Believing that People Who have to Work to Eat do not
Count
Regarding the pandemic, I am the definition of
privileged. I am privileged.
I work from home during the pandemic. I have a high paying job as a software
engineer, and I did not lose one dollar of income due to the pandemic. My
co-workers are the same. Let me make this clear: the fact that my work
does not require me to physically interact with people like a person who works
in a restaurant or
a barber or nail salon was BLIND LUCK. I didn't know a pandemic was coming,
I didn't carefully select my career to be able to work from home. I got
lucky. My choice to be a high paid software engineer does not make me
superior (or better in any way) than people who interact with the public for a
living like a doctor, or a server in a restaurant, or somebody who cuts hair for
a living.
One of the most repugnant things I've watched is how my co-workers treat people who were not so lucky as us. Let's say the person owns a hair salon. They have put their life and savings and heart and soul into this business, and they do a good job and work hard every day. My co-workers and family treated these people like disposable throw away servants at best, and treated them like they were trash that made bad life choices at worst. There is zero empathy for them. "Just shut everything down" say the rich people gleefully from behind their computer monitors at home. The rich people with nothing to lose then order GROCERIES DELIVERED to their door. That was a human being that just took those risks for them. And they threw that human under a bus, and don't even thank them for their sacrifice.
It is EXTREMELY ironic that I get attacked viciously for this next paragraph. Anybody who attacks me lacks even the most basic reading comprehension. Let me be clear, I'm not talking about being upset at not getting food served to me, I'm talking about HUMAN BEINGS and MY FRIENDS losing their life savings. If you think this is about me eating food then it makes you a HORRIBLE person who can't comprehend basic sentence structure. So here we go: Every single last one of our favorite family run restaurants in California went out of business forever. Not shut for the pandemic, shut forever. You may not know this, but most good restaurants are small businesses - not chains owned by massively wealthy investors. It turns out you can't require a small business to pay rent for a full year but not allow them to run their business to make money. They can't survive that. And these are my friends, and they do a good job in my community. They were thrown under the bus. And they were JEERED AT as "selfish" for wanting to keep their business alive by a bunch of people who didn't have to sacrifice the same amount. It showed a very ugly side of my co-workers, and I will never see them in the same way ever again. Again, this isn't about me getting served food in my place of privilege. I couldn't care less about myself, I WAS FINE. I'm talking about human beings here, good people, my friends, and you hurt them.
The narrative I would hear from my co-workers and friends and family that all had safe jobs was "it's just a job, they can get another job, you can't get another life". That is a repulsive statement to say to a small business owner who spent 25 years building up their business with blood, sweat, tears, sacrifice, and hard times. The small business owner can't just "get another job". They worked EXTREMELY hard to get to this point, and there isn't enough time left before retirement and death to repeat it. Only some privileged ass-clown who has never started their own businesses would say something that insensitive and cruel. A cruel, thoughtless person who never took a risk, never sacrificed, and just shows up and expects the business owner to pay them. That kind of person thinks jobs just exist, and will always exist, and they can just go get another salary somewhere else if the business they work for fails. That "business" is a family who mortgaged their home to run that business to provide a fair service to their community. Those are people that will never recover. So it better be important and be REALLY worth it that people who were safe (like me) decided that business should be shuttered forever, with no compensation for their sacrifice.
Some people have to go to work face to face with other people in order to buy food to eat. If they do not work, they cannot buy food, they die of starvation. They need to pay their rent, they need to work. They want to pay their children's college tuition, so they need to work. I understand some people can just work from home (like me), but they can't. And I understand some people will use the income they make for a 2nd Europe vacation this year, but some people need money to eat. "It's just a job" implies you can move back in with your parents and they will support you. Some people didn't get handed all the opportunities these rich, self righteous clowns were handed, some people don't have parents to fall back on. There was no sympathy extended.
The Government Flip-Flops 180 Degrees Several Times:
There were several absolutely amazing flip flops where either the CDC, or the
Federal Government, or State Governments were caught changing a recommendation
180 degrees, to the exact opposite of what they said a few days earlier.
One of the oddest things was how most people would defend them BOTH times.
Here are some examples:
Politician Hypocrisy:
"Rules for Thee, but not for Me"
There were several absolutely
STUNNING examples of politicians getting caught doing exactly the opposite of
what they mandated for others. None of them were ever held properly accountable. It
goes to a pattern that the people passing these arbitrary restrictions without
passing any voter approved laws didn't believe in what they were saying.
Or at very least it makes them HORRIBLE and SELFISH human beings - and you start
questioning should people this terrible be given ultimate power to decide every
aspect of who can gather, who can travel, who can get a haircut.
Here are some I can remember:
The Question that became Political:
Do Cloth Masks Help Slow the Spread?
For the record up front: I think "masks work to reduce infections"
if used properly and made out of the correct materials. The main question I
have is how effective they are in the real world, with cloth masks made out of
inferior materials, worn improperly, and rarely washed (do they slow the spread 1% or 20% or 50% or
99.9%)? A secondary question is what works better: cloth or paper surgical
masks, or N95 masks? And it irks me that by raising this question (which I
think is legitimate) that I am labeled "anti-mask". This became political,
and some sort of a dog whistle for conservatives or something like that.
I have no problem with wearing a mask, and I did so throughout the pandemic. People didn't have to ask me to put it on, or "pull it up", I did it for several reasons including:
Just one quick note on masks related to virus vs bacteria... One thing that seems to be totally lost on most people is that when they see doctors wearing paper (not cloth) surgical masks, it is usually to stop bacteria (which is large) from getting expelled from their lungs, or to stop bacteria from entering their lungs. Paper masks and cloth masks especially have never been about blocking viruses, which are smaller than bacteria. Covid is a virus. An analogy I have seen used is shooting a BB gun at a chain link fence. Sure, some of the BBs bounce off the wires, but most go through.
Ok, with all that said, back to the critical question: how effective are
masks and which types? As far as I can tell, cloth masks are about 1% effective at slowing the
spread of Covid-19, and paper surgical masks are a little better, I don't know the number
because nobody will tell me, but maybe 5%? And the N95 masks are a little
better when worn by professionals and thrown out every 30 minutes or thrown out
immediately if touched by either bare hand. Most effective is probably a
hazmat suit.
Edit 8/23/2021: a study came out today with some effectiveness numbers agreeing
with my chart below:
https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0057100 The study came to the
conclusion that cloth masks block 10% of Covid blown through it, paper surgical
masks blocked 12%, and N95 is up at blocking 60%. I want to point out this
doesn't translate to 10% fewer Covid transmissions for cloth masks, it might
block more than 10% of Covid transmissions, or it might blow less than 10% of
Covid transmissions, but at least the study backs the concept that these are
"different levels" of protection and all masks are not created equal. (End
of Edit.)
Edit 1/11/2022: a new article came out today saying N95 is 75 times more
effective than paper masks (I wonder how it compares to cloth?). Original
here:
https://www.axios.com/n95-mask-protection-covid-958039c9-07f1-45a1-81e7-b7436707fee5.html
Preserved as screenshot here for longevity (click
here).
So to recap in order of effectiveness:
From left to right, the cloth mask isn't very effective, the paper mask is better, the N95 worn by a professional with training and eye protection is getting better, and a Hazmat suit will keep you safe.
Now, what did the research show BEFORE 2019, before it got political? Studies have been done for more than 100 years since the Spanish Flu on using public masking to prevent viral spread, and there is really very little evidence to show they work very well IN THE REAL WORLD (they of course block some particles in the air when you sneeze at them). This was "well established" in the scientific community before it became political. It's very odd the scientific community didn't stand up for science harder, but like me, they just kept their head down and didn't want to cause trouble.
Ok, so we all WANTED face masks to work, and they make sense, right?
Look at the picture below of a man exhaling smoke through a paper face mask:
The problem
here is that when you exhale, in fact your breath does go through the mask, and
some goes out the sides.
And some of that breathe has Covid-19 virus in it. It sucks, but all of
the evidence shows cloth face masks are not 100% effective. I lived in the
San Francisco Bay Area during part of the pandemic, and mask compliance was
basically 100% - nobody made a scene, everybody wore masks in food stores.
But the virus still infected people. Now something amazing happened when
people got vaccinated which was about 95% effective at stopping infection - the
infection and death rates dropped like a rock through the floor. So to me,
the evidence shows that masks are NOT as effective as the vaccine. In
fact, not even close.
More evidence that masks aren't significantly (like even 20%) effective at blocking transmission: if you look at when mask mandates were passed, there doesn't seem to be any clear "trend line change" of infection rates dropping after mask mandates were passed. Take a look at these charts from https://twitter.com/yinonw/status/1321177359601393664 :
If mask mandates were SUPER effective, there would be trend line changes that were "evident" on these charts, right?
So what is going on? Why if studies in a laboratory show if you sneeze on a mask it blocks part of the transmission (like 50% let's say for the sake of argument) then why doesn't a mask mandate drop infections by 50% in society? Well, there is this really interesting concept/debate that has been studied and debated for 50 years regarding seat belts in cars. Seat belts work REALLY WELL in laboratories, but for some reason highway deaths don't drop precipitously when you mandate seat belt use. The explanation is this: in the real world, people feel safer when they have seat belt on, so they drive more recklessly which eats up all the safety the seat belt adds. HILARIOUSLY this 50 year old debate came up with a concept of something called a "Tullock Spike". Gordon Tullock did a thought experiment where he said, "If we wanted people to drive more carefully, we would mount a spike on the steering column of all cars so if you ever got in an accident you would die." Anyway, applied to mask mandates in the Covid world brought this 50 year old debate into 2021. When people FELT SAFER because everybody was wearing masks, they proceeded to go out and do more things, interact with more people (wearing masks), and did not socially distance enough. They "ate up" all the extra safety margin the masks would provide if you didn't change any other variable but wore a mask.
The picture below is political and a meme, and it is PROBABLY WRONG as to the masks used for each application. But I think it makes an interesting point about how we REALLY DO HAVE 100 years of mask technology used in highly hazardous situations. And we're ignoring all of that technology and knowledge and science and saying things like "two home made cloth masks I made out of cheesecloth are great, they probably block 50% of infections":
Here are some articles published about the effectiveness of face masks
"in the real world" (taking into account how people actually used masks):
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/ - A
July 2020 commentary from "The Centre for
Evidence-Based Medicine" saying masks got political but don't work, or at
least don't work so clearly well that it is worth doing, and says politics got
in the way of studying this problem.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994_article - A May 2020
meta-study on pandemic influenza published by the US CDC found that face masks
had no effect, neither as personal protective equipment nor as a source control.
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/ - no
evidence for the effectiveness of cloth masks against virus infection or
transmission.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200818072706/https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/new-study-reveals-blueprint-for-getting-out-of-covid-19-lockdown
- mask requirement was of no benefit and could even increase the risk of
infection
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data
- University of Illinois concluded face masks have no effect in everyday life,
neither as self-protection nor to protect third parties.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372 - cloth face masks offer
little to no protection in everyday life.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v2 - An April
2020 Cochrane review (preprint) found that face masks in the general population
or health care workers didn’t reduce influenza-like illness (ILI) cases.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528v1 - "evidence is
not sufficiently strong to support widespread use of facemasks”
http://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/13523664 - Japanese researchers found
that cloth masks “offer zero protection against coronavirus”
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/4/e006577 - A 2015 study in the BMJ Open
found cloth masks may increase infection risk.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2019/02/01/Millions-in-Japan-affected-as-flu-outbreak-grips-country/9191549043797/
- Japan, despite widespread use of masks, had influenza epidemic.
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817 - The recommendation to
wear surgical masks to supplement other public health measures did not reduce
the SARS-CoV-2 infection rate among wearers.
Updated July 2021 - https://swprs.org/face-masks-evidence/ - "...studies found little to no evidence for the effectiveness of face masks in the general population..."
May 2021 - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.18.21257385v1 - "....Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-19 growth surges...."
September 2020 - https://aapsonline.org/mask-facts/ - "The [mask] recommendation was published without a single scientific paper or other information provided to support that cloth masks actually provide any respiratory protection."
January 2021 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 - "... we find no clear, significant beneficial effect of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) ..."
June 2021 - This is an article not a study, but has some good references - https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/01/governments-need-to-stop-playing-god/ - "... Several peer-reviewed studies have been unable to find any interesting correlation between the stringency or duration of lockdowns and lives saved. ... Much of this information has been available for a very long time already – certainly since early winter – yet many governments have continued stubbornly dragging out their lockdowns. ..."J
July 2021 - Another article and not a study, more references to John
Ioannidis getting ostracized and punished -
https://www.city-journal.org/panic-pandemic - "...the smear campaign
succeeded in sending a clear message to scientists everywhere: Don’t question
the lockdown narrative...."
The block of articles saying cloth masks are not good at blocking disease and
Covid below are unverified by BrianW. (I have not read all of these) and they come
from a post on reddit, included for my own notes to review later:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29395560/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32590322/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15340662/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26579222/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31159777/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/
https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.01.20049528v1%E2%80%A6
https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.20047217v2%E2%80%A6
https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2006372%E2%80%A6
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2749214%E2%80%A6
https://cmaj.ca/content/188/8/567%E2%80%A6
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5779801/%E2%80%A6
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19216002/
https://aaqr.org/articles/aaqr-13-06-oa-0201.pdf%E2%80%A6
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4420971/%E2%80%A6
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/65/11/1934/4068747%E2%80%A6
https://jstage.jst.go.jp/article/bio/23/2/23%5C_61/%5C_pdf/-char/en%E2%80%A6
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01658736%E2%80%A6
https://journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/0195-6701(91)90148-2/pdf%E2%80%A6
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf
https://cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commentary-masks-all-covid-19-not-based-sound-data%E2%80%A6
https://nap.edu/catalog/25776/rapid-expert-consultation-on-the-effectiveness-of-fabric-masks-for-the-covid-19-pandemic-april-8-2020%E2%80%A6
https://nap.edu/read/25776/chapter/1#6%E2%80%A6
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/5/19-0994%5C_article%E2%80%A6
https://academic.oup.com/annweh/article/54/7/789/202744%E2%80%A6
https://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6599448/%E2%80%A6
https://acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-1342
The Question that became Political AFTER VACCINATION:
Should You Still Wear a Cloth Mask After
being Fully Vaccinated?
Updated 4/29/2021 with this section. The CDC right now says that
fully vaccinated people still need to wear masks. I consider that not
based on any science.
NEW EDIT Updated 5/14/2021. The CDC has flip flopped on this, the scientific consensus was too overwhelming and they looked like fools. Here is one article: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cdc-plans-drop-mask-requirements-fully-vaccinated-people-n1267249
This next section below was written 16 days before the CDC caught up with my opinions....
Here is one article that expresses my views pretty well: https://archive.ph/mIsC8 Title: "Biden's speech sent the wrong message about the power of our vaccines". Here are some select quotes:
"200 [members of Congress] ... entered the 1,600-person-capacity House chamber spaced apart and wearing masks. Some appeared to be double-masked. ... According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s latest report, there were only 7,157 breakthrough infections among 87 million fully vaccinated people — a rate of 0.008 percent. ... there is most likely no one who has coronavirus in a room of 1,600 vaccinated people..... Over-correction has a price; at best, it makes public health measures seem performative rather than science-based. At worst, it calls vaccine efficacy into question."
Copied from other sources (not that article), here are some of the OTHER recommendations the CDC makes that people are permitted to ignore:
• No sushi, ceviche, or raw shellfish. (“To
avoid foodborne infection, do not eat raw or undercooked fish, shellfish, or
food containing raw or undercooked seafood, such as sashimi, some sushi, and
ceviche.”)
• No eggnog, homemade Caesar dressing, runny eggs, or eating raw cookie dough.
(“Avoid
foods that contain raw or undercooked eggs, such as homemade Caesar salad
dressing and eggnog. Cook eggs until the yolks and whites are firm. Do not taste
or eat raw batter or dough.”)
• If you are at a restaurant, “ask
your server if they use pasteurized eggs in foods such as Caesar salad dressing,
custards, tiramisu, or hollandaise sauce.” Commentary by BrianW here: I've
never heard anybody do that (despite the CDC recommending it), and I would not
find it acceptable behavior if they did.
• No rare steaks. (“Thoroughly
cook poultry and meat.”)
• Never cook anything – even in a microwave - without also using a food
thermometer. (“Use
a food thermometer to make sure food cooked in the oven or on the stove top or
grill reaches a temperature hot enough to kill germs. . . When reheating, use a
food thermometer to make sure that microwaved food reaches 165°F.”)
• Limiting alcohol intake to “2
drinks or less in a day for men or 1 drink or less in a day for women.”
• "Don’t swim or
shower while wearing contact lenses because germs can be carried from the water
into your eye."
• "Using
a condom, dental dam or other barrier method every time you have oral sex can
reduce the risk of giving or getting an STD."
• “Make sure kids
wear life jackets in and around natural bodies of water, such as lakes or the
ocean, even if they know how to swim.”
• "Women should
consume 400 micrograms (mcg) of folic acid every day."
• Wearing reflective vests when walking at night. (“Increase
your visibility at night by carrying a flashlight when walking and wearing
reflective clothing, such as reflective vests.”)
BrianW commentary: How many of the people following the CDC's recommendations on
double masking AFTER BEING VACCINATED have been ordering in sushi, cooking rare
steaks, and drinking multiple glasses of wine? They are careful to
double-mask, but are they wearing reflective vests at night? It is
important to note these are all rational suggestions that might keep you
healthy, but terrible mandates. That's the point of the CDC: suggestions.
The same should be true for masks, it simply doesn't make any scientific or
social sense to mandate that fully vaccinated people wear masks. It
elevates Covid to a status never seen before, where we accept deaths by obesity
at some rate, but do not accept deaths by Covid at 1/1 millionth the same rate.
Charts And Graphs:
Some interesting charts and Graphs.
3/27/2021 - The chart below shows "excess deaths" in the USA are far FAR FAR
lower on March 20th, 2021 than a moment 3 years earlier in 2018.
But in 2018 there were no economic lockdowns, no mask mandates, people did not
talk about the pandemic and fear for their lives, and in 2021
these things all came to pass. (Chart below also available here:
https://i.imgur.com/zLQ0Vty.jpg ) From the CDC website:
https://cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Economic lockdowns effect on deaths due to Covid by state: no correlation what-so-ever:
Chart from: https://shahar-26393.medium.com/not-a-shred-of-doubt-sweden-was-right-32e6dab1f47a showing "excess deaths" in Sweden comparing 2017-2018 to 2020-2021:
Another chart from: https://shahar-26393.medium.com/not-a-shred-of-doubt-sweden-was-right-32e6dab1f47a showing Sweden's trending "excess deaths" over the years:
A chart of Sweden deaths vs Austria deaths over time. Austria is one of the most locked down European countries, and they have higher deaths:
In the chart below, it shows "Deaths broken down by Age" (also available here: https://i.imgur.com/7u7wgew.jpg )
Chart below shows zero children ever died of Covid-19 in California as of 5/14/2020. From https://downloads.aap.org/AAP/PDF/COVID-19 State-Level Data Report 5.14.20.pdf Later there were 2 deaths where there were MASSIVE and HORRIBLE pre-existing conditions and the parents ignored the dehydration in their children too long and didn't take them to the hospital to get a fluid IV to save their lives. I would argue this is child neglect, and not due to Covid-19, but when we are talking about statistically ZERO children it isn't worth arguing about. The point here is if your child is healthy, there is no way, shape or form of any concept to think they can die of Covid, because IT JUST DOES NOT OCCUR. And this is GREAT NEWS, what kind of sociopathic monster wants children to die, or parents to worry? Because parents DO NOT NEED TO WORRY. Also see article about how fewer Children died TOTAL during the pandemic: https://time.com/5929751/childhood-mortality-2020-covid-19/ "Fewer Children Died in 2020, Despite the Pandemic. Experts Are Trying to Figure Out Why". BrianW typing here: it seems pretty clear why. Covid-19 simply doesn't kill healthy children, period, end of story. Meanwhile keeping children out of streets, quarantined away saves their lives. It might destroy their psychological well being, but locking them away saves their lives. It creates a very interesting moral dilemma: should you always do what is physically safest, even if it damages other things like "fun", or "the economy" or "mental health"?
Summary Chart of How Many People Die Each Year of All Causes
2016 - 2.71m people
died in the US, total. [1]
2017 - 2.81m people died in the US, total. [2] (an increase of 0.02m = 100,000
additional deaths this year)
2018 - 2.83m people died in the US, total. [3] (an increase of 0.02m =
20,000 additional deaths this year)
2019 - 2.85m people died in the US, total. [4] (an increase of 0.02m =
20,000 additional deaths this year)
2020 - 2.91m people died in the US, total. [5] (an increase of 0.06m =
60,000 additional deaths this year)
So between 2016 and 2017 there was a "larger event" than Covid-19, but nobody
noticed, there were no economic lockdowns, no panic, no 24/7 news cycle.
The official numbers are that
336,802 people died "from" Covid-19 in 2020 in the US. [6] but there
weren't enough "additional deaths" for that to make much sense.
Sources:
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_05_tables.pdf
2 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09_tables-508.pdf
3 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db355-h.pdf
4 - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db395-H.pdf
5 -
https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/the-cdc-reports-more-than-2-9-million-deaths-in-the-u-s-in-2020-at-least-377000-more-deaths-in-2020-compared-to-previous-years/
6 - https://covidtracking.com/data/national/deaths
extra:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate which
shows the death rate climbing every year since 2013.
WHO Flip Flops on Herd Immunity below. From:
https://summit.news/2020/12/23/who-changes-definition-of-herd-immunity-to-eliminate-pre-covid-consensus/
"The World Health Organization has changed the definition of “herd immunity,”
eliminating the pre-COVID consensus that it could be achieved by allowing a
virus to spread through a population, and insisting that herd immunity comes
solely from vaccines."
California mask mandate timelines overlaid with infection rates:
I like the chart below that floated by where it categorizes causes of death by age group in a fairly easy to understand way. I have not verified these numbers or the accuracy, and I don't have an original source, but it is a good idea to present data this way to people about their upcoming mortality (with numbers adjusted for accuracy of course). Click on the chart for a larger more readable version.
a
All done.
